Description
When my friend Jamie Livingston, photographer, filmmaker, circus performer, accordion player, New York Mets fan, and best man at my wedding died on his forty-first birthday, he left behind hundreds of friends and a collection of over 6,754* photographs chronologically organized and neatly stored in a fruit of the month club box and three suitcases.
Are they six and a half thousand images? Well, obviously they are that, but do they stand alone individually or do they tell a story? Is it a memento mori or thousands of celebrations of life in all of its wonderful tentative mess? One story or six and a half thousand declarations of now? The stories that Jamie tells or that hundreds of other people tell and how can they all be true at once?
Now they have been compiled into a book. It’s kind of a big thing weighing over ten pounds with 780 pages.
For eighteen years, Jamie took a single Polaroid once a day, every day, including his last. The photographic project that he eventually named SOME PHOTOS OF THAT DAY, began in 1979 during his last two months at Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Polaroids continued after college as Jamie traveled the world performing with the Janus Circus, then moved through a succession of funky New York City apartments. There are photos of many parties, the “Orphans’ Thanksgivings,” film screenings, visits from a worldwide network of friends and musical jam sessions. Through it all, he took pictures, made movies, and loved his friends. And the Polaroids capture those intertwined lives filled with creativity, pain, celebrations, illness, joy, and the beauty of the ordinary closely observed.
For the first 10 years on March 30, Jamie would lay all the pictures up to that date on the floor and take an anniversary picture. In ten years the collection grew to 3600+ Polaroids and covered the Gymnasium floor of St. David’s School in NYC where the father of a friend of Jamie’s was headmaster. Space constraints kept Jamie from continuing, plus it took several days to arrange the Polaroids during a week that school was in session. The eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth years are smaller tableaux and then the next year finds him literally knee deep in a swamp and the spell is broken. Yet the photos continue day by day.
When Jamie died in 1997 on his 41st birthday in New York City’s Mt. Sinai Hospital, he had set up the camera to frame the very last picture of his body in the hospital bed, completing the story he had begun six and a half thousand pictures earlier.
*There are some as yet unpublished groups of photographs that were stored separately and out of the chronology.
